tamarind
ukwaju · imli · puli · tamr hindī · tamarind
Cultural layer
Indian Food: A Historical Companion (K. T. Achaya, 1994)
The Oxford Companion to Food (Alan Davidson, 1999)
Tamarindus indica L. (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-04)
Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery (Madhur Jaffrey, 1982)
Bangkok: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of Thailand (Leela Punyaratabandhu, 2017)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
- ukwajuEndonymSwahili · East Africa
- imliEndonymHindi · South Asia
- puliEndonymTamil · South India
- tamr hindīColonial tradeArabic (Indian date, the trade name that erased the African origin) · Indian Ocean trade
- tamarindMarketEnglish (from the Arabic) · global market
Connections
18 bonds · 18 sourcedPad thai.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Set Meals and One-Plate Meals: egg-wrapped glass noodle pad thai with shrimp (phat thai wun sen kung ho khai), palm sugar, tamarind paste and fish sauce as its sauce.
Gado-gado and satay sauce.
Sambar.
Searched in Dakshin, 1992, page 5, sambars built on tamarind or tamarind and dhal; pages 19 and 21, rasams of red gram dhal, which is toor, in tamarind juice.
The sweet-sour balance.
Read in Punyaratabandhu's Bangkok, 2017, Set Meals and One-Plate Meals and The Bangkok Pantry: pad thai and chile jam (nam phrik phao), palm sugar with tamarind paste in both, and the sauce for grilled meatballs.
The sweet-sour balance in chutney and sambar.
Tempe bacem.
Milagu kuzhambu, the pepper sambar: the tamarind juice poured onto the mustard seeds as they splutter.
Searched in Dakshin, 1992, page 9, pepper sambar, milagu kuzhambu: heat the oil, add the mustard seeds, and when they splutter add the tamarind juice. Page 5 gives tamarind as the base of a sambar.
Coconut chutney: a marble of tamarind ground in with the coconut.
Searched in Dakshin, 1992, page 75, coconut chutney: a marble-sized piece of tamarind ground with the coconut, fried gram dhal and chillies; page 76, the mint chutney too.
Asam laksa.
Asam laksa.
Bissap and dakhar blends.
Alternative souring agents, rarely used together.
Score unexamined
Sour drink blends.
Score unexamined
Occasional in chutney.
Score unexamined
Occasional in the condiment.
Rawon: tamarind water goes into the black sauce with the kluwek.
Searched in Sri Owen, Indonesian Regional Food and Cookery, 1999 edition, page 159, rawon: three tablespoons of tamarind water with the kluwek paste.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "tamarind", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/tamarind
/archive/tamarind
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.